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When my son first began exhibiting symptoms of anxiety and depression as a sophomore in high school, my husband and I both worked at a California mega-church whose leaders openly preached against psychiatry and psychology.

The message reached a wide audience— from the pulpit, over radio, through books, and at conferences—thus cementing in place a culture in which getting professional help for mental and emotional suffering was discouraged and stigmatized.

This was a new phenomenon for us, one that may have delayed our son getting the help he needed. After I heard about the third suicide of a young Christian that I knew back home in New Jersey, however, I no longer cared what my church community thought. I knew my son needed help and was determined to get it for him.

Nonetheless, I was concerned that the mental health practitioners who treated him would respect his tender faith and the spiritual dimension of his suffering, some of which was directly related to our family’s decision to respond to a vocational ministry calling with a cross-country move and to the culture of the church where that calling was initially lived out. …

Stories help us make sense of the world. True stories told by our elderly relatives help us understand ourselves, and the telling also helps the storytellers make sense of their lives, says Laity Leadership Institute Senior Fellow Dan Blazer, M.D.

“One of the most critical things a family can do is to try to recognize the value of an older person, and one of the best ways to do that is to get the older person to talk about himself or herself, or maybe write about himself or herself. Then actually pay attention to what they write,” Blazer said when The High Calling talked to him recently. …

Depression causes more disability than any other psychiatric disorder,” Laity Leadership Institute senior fellow Dan Blazer, M.D. said his 2005 book The Age of Melancholy: Major Depression and Its Social Origins. In fact, depression is as disabling or more disabling than diabetes and hypertension, he said, and the World Health Organization estimated that it will be the second leading contributor to the “global burden of disease” by 2025.

Although those born in the later part of the 20th century suffer higher rates of depression than those born earlier, roughly 15 percent of the elderly experience significant symptoms.

A Crossword Puzzle Case Study

When The High Calling interviewed Dr. Blazer last fall, he talked about a patient who is close to 90 years old. The man had called Blazer a few weeks earlier to say he was feeling “terrible,” that he wasn’t sleeping and was losing weight, all of which are symptoms of depression.

The patient also said, “I’m not doing my crossword puzzles.”

“He had been doing crossword puzzles for 80 years,” said Blazer. “All of a sudden he wasn’t doing them. That signals loss of interest, which is another symptom of depression.”

Blazer prescribed medication. When he talked to the patient a few weeks later, he said he was feeling much better.

Proverbs 23:7 says, “As [a man] thinks in his heart, so is he” (NKJV). When it comes to geriatric health, this statement has repeatedly proven true.

“Self-perceptions of older adults about their health and well-being may be at least as important as objective data for predicting the course of their health over time,” Laity Leadership Institute Senior Fellow Dan Blazer, M.D. wrote in a 2008 article that was published in The Geriatrist.

“Most clinicians treating adults focus on facts: facts about the behaviors of their patients (eg. the number of times a patient gets up at night to use the bathroom), facts about their physiological function (eg. lab values), and facts about their daily function ( eg. activities of daily living). Nevertheless, research has shown over the years that the perceptions of older adults about their health and well-being may be at least as important as facts,” he explained. …

In his 2002 book, Depression in Late Life, Laity Leadership Institute Senior Fellow Dan Blazer, M.D. retells a story from the life of Siddhārtha, who would come to be known as the Supreme Buddha. The young prince left his palace one day and came across a “tottering, wrinkled, white-haired, decrepit old man who was bent over, trembling, and mumbling something incomprensible while he tottered along, balanced by a stick he used for a cane.” Seeing this sight, Siddhārtha is said have told his chariot driver, “It’s the world’s pity, that weak and ignorant beings, drunk with the vanity of youth, do not behold old age. Let us hurry back to the palace. What is the use of pleasures in life, since I myself am the future dwelling-place of old age?”

The perception of old age as a depressing season of life, however, is not confirmed in scientific studies of the elderly, Blazer concluded. …

Laity Leadership Institute senior fellow Dan Blazer, M.D., PhD. describes himself as a “prototypical academic psychiatrist,” but the path to his specialty in geriatric psychiatry was anything but typical.

Blazer spent two years as a young medical missionary in Cameroun and Nigeria, where he ran a mobile clinic in remote villages. He was impressed by the good mental health of the elderly he encountered among the 150-200 patients he treated every day.

“If a person survived into late life relatively healthy, they did exceptionally well, so I was curious what it was about being in that society that permitted these older people to do as well as they did,” said Blazer.

“I immediately got involved with the aging center and basically have been doing geriatric psychiatry ever since. But I think the stimulus was the work in Africa where I saw these very healthy people aging,” he said. …

How gratitude, a change of scenery and sharing stories have helped me face the Thanksgiving holiday after my son’s suicide.

Memorial Tree from 2010 New York City Survivor Day event.

My son Gabriel was a Thanksgiving baby. His birthday didn’t fall on the actual holiday until his second birthday, but it does every four years, including the year he died by suicide, 2008. The association between his birthday and our most heartwarming holiday presents both challenges and opportunities for getting through what has become, for me, an emotionally-fraught month.

When the leaves begin to change color and the air begins to bite, I start wrestling with memories of baking Turkey-shaped shortbread cookies for his school celebrations and his favorite apple pie for our family one. The pain of creating new memories that don’t include my son is one I don’t think will ever subside entirely.

But, in my family, Thanksgiving isn’t about football, movies or family fights, though the day may include all of those. It’s about gathering around an over-stuffed table to give thanks to God for his sustenance and his faithfulness, no matter what the circumstances of our lives have been. …

Psychiatry and faith offer complimentary insights into the human condition and can help us to lead healthier and more satisfying lives, we learned in our seven-part series with Laity Leadership Institute Senior Fellow, Allan Josephson, M.D. …

I don’t need the test at the Center for Internet Addiction website to tell me that I spend too much time online. I know I do. But for a web journalist like me, disconnecting for any length of time is unrealistic.

“What are the dangers and what can I do?” I asked Laity Leadership Institute Senior Fellow Allan Josephson, M.D.

Rather than direct me away from the internet, Josephson offered hope for responsibly managing my relationship to it. …

The United States is known for its fast-paced, hard hitting business culture. Many careers demand 60 hour weeks or more if we’re going to succeed and provide for our families. Inherent in this climate is the temptation to worship at the altar of work.

Laity Leadership Institute Senior Fellow Allan Josephson,M.D. knows something about this, not only from treating psychiatric patients, but also from his own experience of juggling a challenging career with family commitments.

As a psychiatric resident, Josephson spent a week living with patients at the Hazelden Chemical Dependency Center in Minnesota. Twelve-step meetings at the center began with introductory statements like “I am an alcoholic” and “I am a drug dependent” and he didn’t battle these addictions, so he introduced himself by saying, “I am Allan Josephson, I am a workaholic.”

He recounted this story in a lecture he gave upon receiving the Oates Award from the Wayne Oates Institute. Oates, an accomplished therapist and theologian, coined the term workaholic.

“He recognized that how we approach work can have an addictive quality to it and have the same effect in our interpersonal relationships and our health,” said Josephson. “Doing things of substance requires so much of us. There are trade offs and as long as you keep your values in front of you, that’s all you can do sometimes.”

As a child and adolescent psychiatrist, Josephson has seen a lot of families broken by disordered priorities. He offers the following suggestions for finding a healthy balance. …

Dealing with the narcissists in our lives is never easy, but there is hope for improving these difficult relationships, says Laity Leadership Institute Senior Fellow AllanJosephson, M.D.

Narcissism develops out of early relationships and is sustained by subsequent ones, so it’s important to nip the problem in the bud. How one does that depends on the nature of the relationship. In this article, we’ll deal with three kinds of relationships: parent/child, husband/wife, and employer/employee. …

“A Legacy of Madness breaks down the barriers of silence that shroud mental illnesses within families for generations,” Carter wrote. “By sharing the story of his family history and his own personal journey, Tom Davis provides hope and inspiration to others.”

Tom Davis will be signing copies of Legacy of Madness at 7 p.m., Friday, October 6 at Booktowne, 171 Main Street in Manasquan, and at 11 a.m., Sunday, October 9 at Barnes & Noble at Brick Plaza in Brick.

I sat down with Davis for a forthright interview about what it was like to grow up with his mother’s undiagnosed mental illness and what he did to change the course of history in his family. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.